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Bezig met laden... Hell to Pay: Operation DOWNFALL and the Invasion of Japan, 1945-1947door D. M. Giangreco
PSU Books (134) Bezig met laden...
Meld je aan bij LibraryThing om erachter te komen of je dit boek goed zult vinden. Op dit moment geen Discussie gesprekken over dit boek. Though not a fan of 'what ifs' this is a good account of what might have ensued if Operation Downfall had been enacted. What struck me was the amount of military hardware still in the Home Islands and how many aircraft the Japanese had held back for the last battle for Japan. Writing style however can be bland and tedious at times. ( ) Having been driven to distraction by the so-called revisionist historians over the issue of whether the use of atomic weapons against Japan was justifiable, this author has two main aims. One is to demonstrate that the Japanese military was not operationally bankrupt when it came to the defense of the home islands. The other is to illustrate the American policy process which generated the horrendous potential casualty figures that are often used to justify the use of atomic weapons, and to demonstrate the validity of those figures. Giangreco seems to be successful on both these counts. Mind you, this book is best read as an analysis of military planning on either side of the hill. The best book on the policy twists and turns of how the Japanese surrender came about is still Frank's "Downfall," followed by a cautious dip in Hasegawa's revisionist-flavored "Racing with the Enemy." As for criticisms, I'm not sure that Giangreco is well-served by his occasionally tendentious tone, though that is mostly reserved for the introduction and footnotes. Two, I miss the inclusion of a bibliography. geen besprekingen | voeg een bespreking toe
History.
Military.
Nonfiction.
HTML:Hell To Pay: Operation Downfall and the Invasion of Japan, 1945-1947 is a comprehensive and compelling examination of the myriad complex issues that comprised the strategic plans for the American invasion of Japan. U.S. planning for the invasion and military occupation of Imperial Japan was begun in 1943, two years before the dropping of atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In its final form, Operation Downfall called for a massive Allied invasion--on a scale dwarfing D-Day--to be carried out in two stages. In the first stage, Operation Olympic, the U.S. Sixth Army would lead the southern-most assault on the Home Island of Kyushu preceded by the dropping of as many as nine atom bombs behind the landing beaches. Sixth Army would secure airfields and anchorages needed to launch the second stage, Operation Coronet, 500 miles to the north in 1946. The decisive Coronet invasion of the industrial heartland of Japan through the Tokyo Plain would be led by the Eighth Army, as well as the First Army, which had previously pummeled its way across France and Germany to defeat the Nazis. These facts are well known and have been recounted, with varying degrees of accuracy, in a variety of books and articles. A common theme in these works is their reliance on a relatively few declassified high-level planning documents. An attempt to fully understand how both the U.S. and Japan planned to conduct the massive battles subsequent to the initial landings was not dealt with in these books beyond the skeletal U.S. outlines formulated nine months before the initial land battles were to commence, and more than a year before the anticipated climactic series of battles near Tokyo. On the Japanese side, plans for Operation Ketsu-go, the decisive battle in the Home Islands, have been unexamined below the strategic level and seldom consisted of more than a list of the units involved and a rehash of U.S. intelligence estimates of Kamikaze aircraft available for the defense of Kyushu. Hell to Pay examines the invasion of Japan in light of the large body of Japanese and American operational and tactical planning documents unearthed by the author in both familiar and obscure archives, as well as postwar interrogations and reports that senior Japanese commanders and their staffs were ordered to produce for General MacArthur's headquarters. Hell to Pay clarifies the political and military ramifications of the enormous casualties and loss of material projected by both sides in the climatic struggle to bring the Pacific War to a conclusion through a brutal series of battles on Japanese soil. This groundbreaking history counters the revisionist interpretations questioning the rationale for the use of the atom bomb and shows that President Truman's decision was based on very real estimates of the truly horrific cost of a conventional invasion of Japan. Geen bibliotheekbeschrijvingen gevonden. |
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Google Books — Bezig met laden... GenresDewey Decimale Classificatie (DDC)940.54History and Geography Europe Europe 1918- Military History Of World War IILC-classificatieWaarderingGemiddelde:
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